


floating flame and crown of light

by theseourbodies



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Dark Magic, Introspection, Monster of the week except it's magical disaster of the week, Other, Suspense
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:21:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26364868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theseourbodies/pseuds/theseourbodies
Summary: Arthur puts his hand out and ruffles the sheaves of grain, still rolling in their fields, untouched. It has so far turned away sickle and sword, knife and raw strength; the wheat is ready to harvest, trembling perfectly between just enough time and too much, and yet nothing has been able to touch it but a gentle hand. Acres and acres of wheat, the backbone of his nation and his army, just waiting to go rotten in the fields under his helpless eyes.A mystery told in two parts.
Relationships: Knights of the Round Table & Arthur Pendragon (Merlin), Merlin & Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)
Kudos: 16





	floating flame and crown of light

**Author's Note:**

> Forgive me for another WIP, but I do have a plan and I have at least half of the next chapter written. I hope you enjoy <3

After the fifth report, taken this time from Hoengarth, a grim old farmer with sharp eyes and a weary face who was well known to Arthur, Arthur himself heads out into the rolling fields to the south of the city and the castle, two knights and Merlin his only companions. When they start passing the thick, waving fields, he smothers an instinctive, regal annoyance. He knows the farmers of Camelot—he used to run wild in their fields, before he was an anointed and proclaimed heir and not just an heir by virtue of birth. The farmers that supplied the citadel with grain had been some of the first people to treat Arthur like a person, bawling him out for accidentally trampling plants but also giving him dried meats or pasties like fond uncles. If a man like Hoengarth believed that there was something wrong in the fields, Arthur damn well knows the man wasn’t just passing on tales. To do otherwise would be to dishonor the man himself and their history. 

Arthur still feels a little foolish only until he comes to the first homestead where  Hoengarth is  waiting with his sons, and the demonstrations begin. 

𓆰

Arthur puts his hand out and ruffles the sheaves of grain, still rolling in their fields, untouched. It has so far turned away sickle and sword, knife and raw strength; the wheat is ready to harvest, trembling perfectly between just enough time and too much, and yet nothing has been able to touch it but a gentle hand. Acres and acres of wheat, the backbone of his nation and his army, just waiting to go rotten in the fields under his helpless eyes. 

This is worse than the curse of the unicorn that Arthur had caused a lifetime ago. Already he can foretell the events of the next weeks in his mind’s eye: the line of desperate faces and bodies already gone frail, wending its way through the lower city; Arthur watching from the battlements as his father had, hand clenched impotently around a sword, waiting for the nation to rot around him like the crop in the field. 

He wonders how Uther could stand it. He wonders, as he commands that the horses be readied and his men roused, if he will ever be able to bear the weight like his father had, implacable.

There is no Anhora to set the quest before Arthur this time, but Arthur has learned that he needs to be watchful even in times of peace. His path to this latest disaster isn’t immediately clear, but he carefully recalls everything that had happened in the past month: audiences with peasants and noblemen alike that had gone poorly, meetings with other leaders and royals, even smaller interactions with his household, his councilors and servants. Such a suspicious watchfulness is not a natural state for Arthur—he had worked and worked at the skill like he had once worked and worked with the mace and the sword; just like the weapons he excelled at now, he had been rewarded eventually. His bitter ascension to the throne had done nothing but hone his memory and skills of observation even finer; like a blade’s edge sharpened too often, he too had gone brittle. With difficulty, he can admit that after Morgana’s betrayal and the start of Arthur’s reign, he may have become over-cautious and worse, indiscreet about it. 

“Paranoid,” Merlin had said with joke sincerity and very, very worried eyes when Arthur had made the bumbling admission to him one day. “I think the word you’re looking for is paranoid... sire.” 

But what does a man like Merlin, so caught up in his day to day life, know about it anyway? How could Merlin possibly know what it feels like to have a kingdom resting on his shoulders as enemies dangle, sword-like, over his head.

𓆰

As expected, once  Arthur has a moment to sit and think, the path to this latest calamity becomes clear. He remembers: 

A beautiful man, features fine and skin smooth, standing in the clothes and patches of a peasant, waiting for an audience with the King. The man had been instantly suspicious—not because of his un-muddied hems or the clean beds of his fingernails, but because of Merlin, who had shifted audibly behind Arthur when the man stepped up to bow perfectly. Lippy as Merlin had been about Arthur’s penchant for hypervigilance after re-taking his kingdom, Merlin himself had been the one to educate Arthur about healthy paranoia. Arthur has learned the hard way to pay attention when Merlin becomes uneasy. 

The man had come to petition the kingdom for – oh  _ damn – _ seeds to supplement his village’s stock, which had gone moldy over the unusually wet winter months. Arthur had been sympathetic to the plight of the man’s village; the citadel’s own stores had been untouched by the snowmelt, and there had been more than enough to spare for the headman. Arthur had even supplied a cart to carry the supplies, and two city guards to protect the man against eager bandits on the road. Arthur is not concerned that he funded this betrayal from his own coffers, so to speak; he remembers that the man had been appropriately grateful, but he also remembers that Merlin had been a towering, black mood for the rest of the day, storming around doing his duties with a pinched look on his face that meant he was feeling rather a lot but he thought he was hiding it rather well. Arthur, well acquainted with this look, had been torn between vague concern and deep annoyance at both Merlin for his mercurial moods and for himself for caring. Foolishly, Arthur had supposed that Arthur’s unnatural awareness of his manservant’s feelings would go away once he became king. 

It shames Arthur just how many times a look or a word from Merlin has utterly altered the course of Arthur’s own thoughts. Or, worse, altered his very will, which was not longer only Arthur’s own. His will and his word held the power over life and death, peace and war; God help them is Merlin ever realized exactly how much sway he and his extremely open face had over Arthur.

Thankfully, for all his eerie moments of wisdom and strange perception, Merlin really was painfully oblivious; besides this generally lack of awareness, of course, there is also the simple and embarrassing fact that there are none left living that Arthur would trust with this power over him. 

𓆰

They make for the village the  supposed-headman had named as his home at dawn the next day. They ride hard. Merlin objects to being left behind to ride with their spare mounts as loudly as he can without opening his mouth, but Arthur doesn’t humor him this time. His spare horse and the rest of the knights’ are well-trained animals that would follow their masters loyally even without Merlin to mind them, but more than a well-rested spare mount Arthur needs a moment of peace, free from Merlin’s ever-increasing agitation. Arthur needs to not be worried about the way that Merlin always gets when they ride out after a sorcerer—silent and tense and even more poorly seated than usual. 

Arthur doesn’t know who it is that Merlin regrets, who it is that haunts Merlin when Arthur and the knights ride out against whatever new magic user is menacing the kingdom in the name of Uther Pendragon’s hatred and fear. He thinks sometimes that it might be the boy from Ealdor—the sorcerer that Merlin had grown up with and who he had probably—loved, wanted, whatever. Arthur doesn’t dwell on it too often. 

On the topic of magic users, Arthur both does and does not share his father’s mind. The concept of magic being a force of corruption had been logical when he was a boy; now, it is utterly seductive, to think that it was magic, and not his father or himself, that drove Morgana into her madness and away from them; that it was magic and not the rage that Uther himself had fed and fanned until his dying breath that had brought magic users into Camelot with fury in their hearts and malice on their minds. But to blame the power and not the man is like blaming the enchanted weapon for cheating instead of the knight wielding it, and Uther himself had taught Arthur that victory, peaceful or otherwise, could only be achieved when you understood the person wielding a weapon of steel or of state. Arthur has no hope of truly understanding magic, but he thinks he would like to understand the man wielding it. 

At least with Merlin riding back behind them, Arthur is spared from having to watch his manservant go silent and wary as they ride, made brittle by a tension that Arthur can’t understand and cannot hope to fix. Now, when they stop and rotate mounts, Merlin is in his usual waspish mood after a long ride, distracted from their destination even just a little bit as he refuses to talk as loudly as he possibly can. Arthur prefers neither of these versions of Merlin, but Merlin is one of the few things in all of Camelot  that Arthur’s preferences cannot influence unless Arthur opens his mouth and really, really means it. 

Just like Merlin’s express desires could sway a kingdom through Arthur, there’s nothing that Merlin has ever denied him, not if it was something that Arthur really wanted. The death of a dragon or an apple in springtime; sometimes, it feels like Merlin could bring about anything, if Arthur just thought to mention it to him. 

𓆰

When they come across  Redfall , the village is quiet; that is expected of any place that is kept only by the dead. The former occupants of houses, their livestock, everything that breathed—all rest lifeless where they had fallen. 

Arthur may not have been able to keep his father’s opinion of magic, but at times like this, he at least understands the fear that had always lived in Uther, and the way that Uther, King, had trembled at the injustice of such an imbalance of power between those that used magic and those that did not. Looking at the still, dead village, he can almost feel a  sympathetic shake . But as always, he remembers the hypocrisy of the fear of a king, someone who by right of birth automatically and always held the power of life and death in both hands and voice. 

All around them, farms are tucked into clearings in the forest. Between the trees, he can see it—fat, ripe wheat ripples in waves, perfect and untouched. 

Arthur’s knights dismount without an order and immediately start systematically investigating houses and shops. This is not the first scene of magical malice they have had cause to search. He moves with them, careful of traps, examining everything they can. Merlin stays a step behind Arthur, a silent, watchful shadow cooling his back. 

“Nothing, sire,” Leon reports grimly when they come back into the center of the village. “No symbols or markings on any of the houses or the fence posts.” With a visible effort, he makes himself say, “It... may be natural, sire, but--”

Gwaine cuts him off. “There’s nothing natural about this, mate. You don’t have to say it.”

There was a time, not long ago, when Leon would have bristled and continued offering Arthur alternatives to the obvious conclusion, stubborn in the way that knights brought up under Uther could be about such things. But Leon has done his best to shake old habits learned under an old ruler, and Arthur appreciates how now, surrounded by such unnatural death and at Arthur’s side, Leon only looks relieved to not have to continue offering alternatives. 

“Do we have time to take care of the dead?” Percival asks quietly. When Arthur turns to him, his knight has his eyes fixed on an open doorway, where a small hand can be seen flung out over the threshold. From the corner of his eye, Arthur sees Merlin shift closer to the big man, silently asking the same question as loudly as if he had screamed it. 

“If we split the work, we can still scout around and take turns on body duty,” Arthur offers, in mutually understood deference to the way that Elyan’s dark skin had gone ashen at Percival’s request. Asking the younger man to handle the dead would end badly for his stomach and his pride, and if Arthur knows nothing else it’s that there’s no lessons to be learned in humiliation.  Gwaine steps up with his usual dramatics, volunteering himself and Elyan to scout in such a way that makes it seem as if  Gwaine is the one with the sour stomach; if  Gwaine’s hand on Elyan’s arm is supporting rather more of the Elyan’s weight that usual, Arthur pointedly doesn’t notice. 

They get down to their grim business swiftly once Elyan and  Gwaine have slipped into the forest. They discard heavy cloaks and plate  armor swiftly; as the sun rises, they strip to skin; they fight the smell with strips torn off spare shirts tied ineffectually tied over their noses and mouths. It’s long hours of work with few breaks, but none of the remaining knights or Merlin even think to complain that Arthur had said the work would be rotating. 

“This  _ isn’t  _ natural,” Merlin finally says once  Gwaine and Elyan have returned, arms  laden with small logs and sticks and news of a promisingly ominous, dilapidated stronghold some five miles west; with the added help and the helpful fuel, they’ve all started the well-known business of pyre building. When Merlin breaks the silence, his voice is strange and low, almost savage with intensity. He watches their pile of bound up sticks come together in the center of town with hot, red-rimmed eyes. “This is—all these  _ people,  _ just for a curse?” 

“This is magic, Merlin—you expect anything natural when it comes to magic?” 

“I expect some  _ sense,  _ yes!” The  bustle of his men around him stutters when Merlin’s voice snaps through the sounds of their labor like a knife through the air. Merlin quells at their sudden attention, puts his hand over his eyes like he’s hiding from their stares. Something—the hurt shape of Merlin’s mouth under his hand, the miserable hunch of his shoulders—stops Arthur from snapping back immediately. For the first time, Arthur really looks around him. 

The cost of magic has never been a question for him. It has always been intolerably high and terrible—men, women, children all cut down in cold blood by curses and monsters of magic alike for the sake of some sorcerer or warlock’s lust for power or revenge. But this is-- 

He counts them, makes a tally of only the bodies that he himself carried. Five in total, two of them barely half grown. Assuming the same of the others (and accounting for a few more for Percival, who had been working as if he was possessed, and few less for Merlin, who had spent a long half hour that none of them had interrupted on his knees and curled down around a tiny bundle in the shadow of one of the houses) Arthur looks at the stacked bodies in the town center and realized that they’re here bearing witness to the slaughter of almost twenty people. 

It shakes Arthur to the core to realize that this mind has already decided that Merlin is right, that he  _ must  _ be right. This is obscene—even for magic, this is a toll taken directly from too many unwilling people. Even for the sake  of hatred, this is  _ too much.  _

𓆰

No one has anything to say after that outburst. They finish their rotten business and Arthur spends that time thinking, thinking, thinking about all the things he’s noticed about magic that he has so far no allowed himself to examine. Leon isn’t the only knight still struggling with old habits learned under old kings. For once, Arthur’s too physically exhausted to muster up the old, familiar rage at his father—the fury that  Morgause’s conjuring of his mother had first lit in Arthur and that Merlin had only been able to bank but not completely extinguish. Victory requires understanding, but a fight requires knowledge of the weapons an enemy wields—that too had been Uther’s lesson, but he had refused to learn about magic as a tool and had refused also to let Arthur learn. 

Hypocrisy and rage; Arthur is his father’s son, after all. 

The sun is low in the sky when they place the last body on the wide, low platform of wood. They light the whole of it directly, with little fires built up around the base. Without a word, they step back and watch as the flames catch on the bundles of sticks all at once as if the wood was breathing it in. The flames are high and hot within fifteen minutes; even after they step away, they can never entirely get upwind of it. 

𓆰

The sky finally goes sweetly purple and pink above them as the sun finally starts to set. Arthur and his company huddle close to one another for comfort as much as for warmth; all of them are hesitant to light a fire now until they absolutely must. Arthur allows himself to consider it practical rather than cowardly. 

Hoengarth had warned Arthur that they had maybe a week before  the wheat started to fall; if the wheat was harvested after that, the kingdom could still recover at least half of what had originally been anticipated. The kingdom wouldn’t starve, but it would be a near thing. The few tenant farmers they had come across standing stooped in their fields had cautiously advised the same thing with hollow, helpless eyes. Bringing along spare mounts had cut nearly a day off their travel time to  Redfall village, but after half a day spent taking care of the dead, they were fighting time as much as some unknown magical force. Barring the obviously damage this catastrophe would wreak on his reputation as king and caretaker, Arthur would rather slit his own throat to appease this unknown sorcerer than watch his subjects die a slow and wasting death at that man’s whim.

Despite the risk that it would take time away from other paths, Arthur had already approved a plan to approach the nearby citadel in the morning. Earlier, while the pyre burned, Elyan had carefully laid out the location and specifics, and even if it was a dead end at least Arthur would be moving forward. Merlin had been silent as Arthur had discussed the plan going forward. Arthur can see that his eyes are still shock-wide over his mouth, a hard slash across his face. Arthur thinks that Merlin might  actually not bother with his usual cowardice when they take the citadel tomorrow instead of forcing Arthur to drag him along until Merlin’s better angels caught up with him. 

The talk around the fire, when they finally light it, is light itself and sparse. It’s only a coincidence that Arthur is looking towards a silent  Gwaine and Percival when he sees that something has caught their most experienced woodsman’s attention.  Gwaine’s head slowly lifts from Percival’s shoulder where he had been slumped, and that’s Arthur’s only warning before he hears it, too—shod feet shuffling towards them rapidly through the undergrowth of the forest.

Arthur eases his knife from its sheath as subtly as he can, fully expecting Leon to catch the movement even from his slump on the other side of the fire. He isn’t disappointed; Leon catches his eye almost immediately, and Arthur signs at him with shallow movements. From then, it’s a chain reaction. Elyan, sensitive to all of their movements, only glances swiftly at Arthur to confirm before he leans forward a little to gently ease his sword out of his sheath on the ground before him;  Gwaine stands and stretches so naturally that even Arthur almost misses the flash of the knives he tucks up either sleeve. Percival, ever careful, catches Merlin’s attention by placing a gentle hand against Merlin’s skinny wrist. Merlin, to his credit, only jumps a little before he settles immediately under Percy’s significant glance. Arthur tracks all of them distantly; their competence is more of soothing balm than an required assurance. 

Then, terribly, all there is left to do is wait. 


End file.
